This invention relates to a system to help financial institutions transactions with customers at their lobbies and places of business.
Financial institutions are coping with various social environmental changes such as finance liberalization by striving for rationalization and efficiency promotion and are trying to give better customer services in order to increase profits. Some of the challenges facing them are rationalizing transaction and follow-up work, promoting more automation for work that is not very profitable, and improving the quality of customer services (better consultation services, access to information etc.). But one of the greatest rationalization challenges will be introducing a new system which will not only facilitate automation, but will also handle transactions more effectively than in secondary on-line system.
Transaction work, which is the contact point between financial institutions and their customers, began with the 2nd line system (the system in which the terminals are disposed near and manipulated by the financial institution employees at the back of the tellers). Later, changes were made with the 1st line/2nd line linkage system (the system in which the terminals are disposed near and manipulated by the tellers as well as the employees behind the tellers and these two types of the terminals are manipulated to complete the transaction) and the 1st line completion system (the system in which transaction can be completed by manipulation of the terminals disposed near the tellers). But in the future, it will be necessary to use more advanced systems such as the 0th line/1st line linkage system, the 0th line completion system, and the home/0th line linkage system. The term, "0th line," in this application refers to a device operated by the customer in the lobby or the place where business transactions are conducted.
At present, various automatic machines such as the CD and the ATM are widely used for simple transactions, but there are very few transaction which can be handled by automatic machines. It is important to implement an excellent new system for transaction work to improve rationalization, efficiency promotion and customer services. Japanese Patent Laid-Open Nos. 95146/1979 and 28161/1980 describe devices used in systems intended to solve these problems and meet these challenges. The system disclosed in the Patent Laid-Open No. 95146/1979 separates the transaction system into 2 parts: a pre-transaction device which the customer inputs to contact the people responsible for the initial stage of the transaction: and a post-transaction device which carries out the transaction desired by the customer. The number of pre-transaction devices installed will be greater than the number of post-transaction devices installed. So when pre-transaction time accounts for a major portion of the total transaction time, there is a significant reduction in transaction time.
The system disclosed in the Patent Laid-Open No. 28161/1980 aims at shortening the input time required by employees by making it unnecessary for customers to fill out forms. Instead, customers have their own transaction cards and operate the keyboards themselves, so that there is direct input into a transaction device.
However, there are some problems in the prior arts. First, problems with the transaction device described in the Patent Laid-Open No. 95146/1979 (hereinafter referred to as document 1) will be considered.
1. In financial institutions, it is important to shorten the time required for each transaction while at the same time remaining capable of flexible responses to fluctuations in the number of transactions per time unit. Because the number of transactions per time unit at the places where financial institutions do business varies very much depending on the time or day, at peak times, this number might be more than 10 times higher than at normal times. It is therefore essential to deal with such fluctuations in a flexible manner.
At present, financial institutions try to maintain flexibility in their transactions with customers by first completing only the initial stage of the transaction (having customers fill out forms and then submit them). In the system widely used at present, customers wait to be called by one of the employees while sitting in comfortable chairs or sofas in the lobby. But when the number of those transaction devices described in document 1 is decided on the basis of how many transactions take place on a normal day or during normal hours, there will be long lines of customers waiting to use the pre-transaction device during peak times. Because customers cannot even begin the first stage of a transaction, they will not be able to relax, and a situation is likely to develop where customers become irritated while waiting to begin the pre-transaction stage. This is because the construction of these transaction devices is such that the pre-transaction device can not accept for a long time many transaction inputs over the capacity of the post-transaction device.
Furthermore, if many additional transaction devices are installed in order to handle peak times adequately, the result will be a very expensive investment for financial institutions.
2. In these transaction devices, transaction success or failure judgments are made in the pre-transaction stage, depending on the results of communication with the data center and its responses which in turn depend on the content of transaction requests made by customers. Therefore, the time elapsing until completion of the pre-transaction process is long when compared with those situations where the process of communication with the data center is included in the post-transaction stage. So it is likely that there will be long lines of customers waiting to use the pre-transaction devices during peak times. Also, when communication with the data center is included in the pre-transaction process, for example when a customer performs only the pre-transaction for deposit and returns without doing the deposit post-transaction (making payment to the financial institution) because of some inconvenience, there will be a situation in which the entire transaction is not completed and the corespondence transaction with the center is just wasted.
3. In these transaction devices, when several post-transaction devices are all engaged in post-transaction activity after the completion of pre-transaction processes, there is no way of informing customers of the post-transaction device they should go to in order to finish their post-transaction as quickly as possible. And there is also no way of guiding customers to the post-transaction device which is most suitable for them. Customers, therefore, have to rely on their own intuition, and line up for the post-transaction device which they feel will help them to finish their transaction as quickly as possible. Therefore, there will be times when one customer will finish the pre-transaction process after another customer but begin the post-transaction process earlier than that customer at a different post-transaction device. When this kind of situation occurs, in which customers who begin later finish more quickly than customers who had begun earlier, there will be some bad feelings among those customers who had begun earlier. And it is also possible that the image of a financial institution which has installed such transaction devices will suffer because of this.
4. Financial institutions often prefer to limit transactions to separate categories such as savings, money orders and loan consultations, or deposit-withdrawals and money transfers. Transaction devices (especially post-transaction devices) can be constructed with good cost-performance in these categories, and training can be given in a short time to those employees who are experienced in such limited transactions.
However, in these transaction devices, when the post-transaction device is not in a customer-waiting situation, it cannot be assigned to a specific customer. Therefore, these transaction devices cannot be used so easily by those financial institutions which have to manage many transaction corners for only specific transaction categories.
5. These transaction machines have the following problems in checking the identity of customers to verify whether or not the customer who is about to perform a post-transaction operation is really the same person who just carried out a pre-transaction.
(1) When things such as magnetic cards are used for identity verification, post-transaction verification time can be shortened, but a magnetic card reader will have to be installed so in the post-transaction device as well as in the pre-transaction device. And this means cost increase. Furthermore, requiring customers to use their magnetic cards twice means that customer service will be inferior to other transaction devices which are currently widely used.
(2) When customers input such things as secret codes required for customer identity verification, customer service will also deteriorate because some customers take a long time for input and there are so many human factors involved in code input, input confirmation etc. Also due to secret code input mistakes, there occur some additional problems to be solved (for example, problems such as how to carry out a second input for secret code numbers, or timing for erasing customer data from a previous input).
Next, consideration will be given to some problems with the bank transaction system described in Patent Laid-Open No. 28161/1980 (hereinafter referred to as document 2). In recent years, the ratio between the number of CD (cash dispenser) cards (which are cards used most commonly) and the number of conventional deposit accounts averages about 57.3% at 11 city banks in Japan where the use of CD cards is the most prevalent (according to data results of finance marketing research survey group in Japan, September, 1984). But because there are some customers who do not like to use CD cards, having such cards cannot become an essential condition for bank transactions. However, such transaction cards are an essential condition in the bank transaction system described in document 2. This system cannot be used by customers who do not have transaction cards (customers who want to use passbooks and seals for transaction).
Furthermore, customer service suffers very much in this system because it is extremely difficult to input the data required for the complicated process through such input keyboards and display devices used as in automatic transaction devices, current CDs or ATMs.
For example, although it is necessary to solve problems of input methods for Japanese characters (KANJI) and syllabaries (KANA) and too long input time to key-in a large PG,10 amount of input data, there is no description of solution of such problems in document 2.
The following is a summary of as yet unsolved problems involved in the prior arts desribed above:
(a) It is not possible to have flexible responses to fluctuations in the number of transactions per time unit.
(b) When customers have to move from an input stage to the actual stage of depositing/withdrawing etc., there is no way to guide them properly.
(c) The system cannot cope effectively with many transaction categories.
(d) Because cards and code numbers are essential for transactions, it is impossible to carry them out using passbooks and seals.
(e) There is no input equipment which can be operated easily by cutomers.